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Friday, May 23, 2014

St Jude's and the Great War: the first few months

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On the evening of Tuesday 16th December 1913 the
St Jude’s Young Men’s group held a debate in the parish club room at 13 North
Square on the motion Germany contemplates war. The Minister of the
Free Church, the Reverend J. H. Rushbrooke, seconded the opposition, while the
Vicar of St Jude’s, the Reverend Basil Bourchier, argued that the peace-loving
women of Germany would never countenance war. The vote was taken
and the Chairman, Mr Alex Richards, of 5 Hurst Close, Churchwarden of St Jude’s,
announced the overwhelming defeat of the motion: Germany does not
contemplate war.

The St Jude’s Parish Paper of 7th August
1914 carried the one-word headline: WAR! and continued, The
direct challenge offered by Germany to Britain has been taken up and the
declaration of war by this country has put an end to a tension which had become
unbearable.

The previous June (1913) Bourchier had been
appointed Chaplain to the 4th (City of
London) Battalion, the Royal Fusiliers, with the rank of Captain. On the
evening of Monday 17th August he was present at a meeting in the Club House,
Willifield Green, held to bid farewell to a member of his congregation, Mabel
St. Clair–Stobart, and her husband John Greenhalgh, of 7 Turner’s Wood, who
were departing for the Belgian Front.In the previous few days Mrs Stobart (as she liked to be known) had
gathered an all-women team of twelve nurses, six doctors, and ten orderlies and
an X-ray operator.Mr Litchfield,
one of the Co-Partners, handed over a cheque for £200, raised from residents of
the Suburb and from a special collection of £36 collected at St Jude’s, in
support of her work.And then the
vicar announced he was going with her.

Mabel St. Clair–Stobart was an extraordinary
woman. She was a feminist and suffragist who believed that wartime
service would prove women’s worth and secure them the vote. Already in
1907 she had founded the Women's Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps to serve
between field and base hospitals. When the British Red Cross refused the
Corps's services in the First Balkan War in 1912 she went anyway, and with her
all-woman unit set up a hospital in Thrace for the Bulgarian Red Cross.It was only eighteen months previously,
in January 1913, that she had been in the Club House for a meeting welcoming
them back to the Suburb.

The Greenhalghs and Bourchier arrived in Brussels
on the 19th August, and set about transforming some rooms in the
University into a first class hospital
for the Allied wounded.The
following day they found themselves watching the German army making a
triumphant entry into the city.Their task now was to head off the rest of their team on its way from
Ostend.When informed that no safe
conducts out of the city were being issued, Mrs Stobart decided to take her
plea to the German commander now installed in the Hotel de Ville.The
officer who received her was married to an English woman, and after a few days
the Suburb Three were given passes to
the Dutch border.

They passed through fifty miles of German-held
territory but were then arrested at Hasselt on 26th August on the grounds that
their permits, though correctly stamped, were not correctly signed.It was suggested that the Vicar
of St Jude’s was only disguised as a minister of religion, and that Mrs
Stobart’s Kodak proved she was a
spy.

After being conveyed by train in a coal wagon to
a neighbouring town, where they were held overnight in a verminous cell, they
were sent to Aachen for trial.They
needed to be protected from a violent mob calling for the deaths of the
accursed English as they were marched to imprisonment below ground in the
town’s fortress. The Vicar’s cell was
the size of a coffin, had no window and just a small plank-bed.
Mrs Stobart, who understood German, kept from him and her husband, the promise
of a Devil-Major that they were to be
shot at dawn.

But then a miracle occurred.In his separate interrogation John
Greenhalgh mentioned that he lived in Hampstead Garden Suburb.The judge immediately showed interest, replied
I was in England in June, and know Oxford
and Hampstead Garden Suburb.Do you know Mr Litchfield?Why, yes, said Greenhalgh, he was my colleague in the housing scheme.The attitude of the Germans changed,
they were released on parole to a
hotel where they invited the supervising officers to dine with them, and after
a few days were back on their way to the border.

The Suburb Three arrived back on the Suburb on
Monday 7 September. The crowd gathering to welcome them and hear their reports
the following week proved too big for the Institute Hall, and the meeting had
to be moved to the Free Church, which was crowded to the doors.

Meanwhile at St Jude’s a Relief Committee
had been formed which, it was immediately agreed, would cooperate with the General
Committee for the Suburb, by raising a voluntary rate from the
parish. Prayers were offered for the Minister of the Free Church who had
found himself in Germany when war was declared, still toiling, he said, on
behalf of friendly relations between two nearly related nations, and
[believing] that the Christian Faith was strong enough to overcome the
suspicions and jealousies that make for war.

On 22 September the indefatigable Mrs Stobart set
off again for the war zone to organize a hospital in Antwerp for the National
Service League. When the city surrendered, only two weeks later, she
ensured all her wounded patients were safely evacuated before setting off on
foot with her remaining workers.As
they were walking along a deserted highway, with the sound of shells screaming
overhead, Mrs Stobart suddenly saw tearing
towards me, at breakneck pace, three London motor buses – a dream-like touch of
incongruity.But I ran out into
the road and, risking being run down, spread out my arms to stop them.The
buses conveyed them to the safety of the allied lines.

Meanwhile young men from the
congregation were seeing their first action.

Captain G. K. Butt, son of Major
George Butt of 4 Meadway, a former Churchwarden, serving with the 1st
Lincolnshire Regiment, wrote to the Vicar: While I am writing shelling is
going on, but not doing much damage as long as we stay under cover. One
feels like a rabbit – we leave our holes as soon as all is quiet. Then
whizz comes a shell, followed by a whole lot more, and away we scuttle into our
holes again. We are on a sandy hill, and it looks just like a rabbit-warren.

The mother of Lieutenant Russell
Wilkinson, of 25 Coleridge Walk, serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps
attached to the Second Middlesex Regiment, appealed for a box of comforts –
mufflers, shirts, belts, mittens – for distribution among his sixteen stretcher
bearers and the wounded. He received two.

At home, Lieutenant Leslie Gamage,
of East End Road, and the Reverend W. H. Baine, of 4 North Square, a teacher at
Haberdashers’ School and assistant priest at St Jude’s, were instructing the
thirty-two boys of the St Jude’s Sharpshooters League in drill and
shooting. Rifles and ammunition had been donated, and a firing range
created in the Vicarage garden. By Saturday 5 December the embryo
soldiers were ready to hold their first public parade and receive badges to go
with their uniforms of navy blue with brass buttons (five for each boy at 2d
each).

The hour was three o’clock, and the
Central Square was all animation. Hark! The tramp of the military is
heard – left, right, left, right . . . Who approach? Have the Huns
arrived? Or is it Kitchener’s Army? Quite plainly it is some particularly
distinguished body of MEN (capital M please!). Yes it is - the St
Jude-on-the-Hill Sharpshooters . . .

The end of the year found Mrs
Stobart back on the continent at the Women’s Imperial
Service Hospital at Chateau Tourlaville, near Cherbourg. Third time
lucky, she wrote.